Great to meet Stefanie and Sophie this evening!

Keep MCR tidy provide a great resource for refuse sacks (and in future we'll tap into their litter pickers and bag rings too) and promote local community litter picking in Manchester. We got a hold of 20-30 pink refuse sacks and between the four of us, collected at least 10 bags (plus a bit more) full sacks of discarded waste!

We covered 6 km, starting by Piccadilly gardens before going along Canal St, to Deansgate and then to the Castelfield bowl before downing tools to run the remaining 1-2 km back to the meeting point.

We collected a whole range of items, including lots of cans/fast food packaging, laughing gas canisters, discarded vapes and cigarette butts, drinks cartons, and lots and lots of polystyrene bits.

We bumped into Don't Walk Past Manchester on their Monday night round and had a chat, possibly due a donation push toward the colder winter months. Keep an eye out for future tasks!

p.s. We did spot a lit Christmas tree in Deansgate. It's coming.

7 Westminster GoodGymers ran 5.5k from to St Andrew’s Youth Club to get it ready for 2020!

New Start Location Next Week!!!!! We will be running out of Marshal Street Leisure Centre only about 300 metres from the New Balance Store, just off Carnaby Street. I will be waiting outside to meet you!!

Running South running past the posh shops and through St James park working out what the bronze domes were for!

We made it 2.5k to St Andrews Youth Club, with a VIP visit the club was even busier than normal and the huge range of activities for Westminsters young people again blows my mind every time!! Our bellies started to rumble as the smell of the cookery club making Chinese New Year celebratory food drifted over.

Prepared for the craziest garage in London we entered the main store room in the club and after a month gap it was in big time need of some TLC!! Looking like my bedroom back in 95 there was hardly a piece of floor without something random placed not neatly on it. So we emptied the garage and put the jigsaw back together! Creating a walkway and order not seen in the garage this year!! Allowing for things no matter how random to be found and the youth club to function seamlessly as usual!

With the garage looking great it was time to head back to scout out our new Start location!! Working out (getting wrong) the routes to Marshal street hopefully it will be smooth sailing next week!!

5.5k complete we said goodbye to New Balance which has been our home for the last 3 years!

See you next week

Joel

9 GoodGym Westminster runners ran 7k to Little Venice to pick up 8 buckets full of recycling along the canal to celebrate GoodGym’s 10th Birthday!! #GG10

A lovely evening in London Town for our Wednesday adventures as we glided down 3.5k on Little Venice with a couple of stops to fly the GG flag along the way.

Big shout out to Elena for her first GG run and a massive congratulations to Tom for reaching to Magical 50 GoodDeed milestone.

Arriving at the Canal and River Trust HQ where we grabbed our kit and headed out to rid the canal of as much recycling as possible for the evening! We limited the rubbish collection as the bins were way over flowing and really focused our efforts on recyclables as there was a handy line of recycling bins we could use.

Working our way West we found plenty of plastics, bottles and cans and even managed to do a on the grab sort of the recycling.

Great to be on the canal path as the sun set on a lovely September day doing our bit to help this beautiful stretch of water looking at its best!

35 minutes of grabbing, sorting and recycling away had us ready for the off. With the hands sanitised and kit put away we runoff as the darkness fell.

Getting back to base with a good workout complete and a top task in the bag we stretched out and head off into the night!

Thanks for coming along and hope to see you next week for our visit to St Andrews youth Club!!

Joel

15 runners met on an oddly mild January evening to run and help St. Peter's Church spruce up after the busy festive period!

Lots of returning faces and regulars last night but we also had 3 brand new members join us. Welcome Basia, Elena and Dagmara!

Getting into the swing of things!

We kicked things off with a warm up focusing on opening up the hips and getting us ready for some good running form. It's really important to prepare your body for exercise especially in the winter when everything is cold and stiff or if you have a sedentary job and haven't moved a lot during the day. We did lots of leg swing drills, similar to these, as well as lots of high knees to raise our pulses! We also discussed our favourite pre-run food, it turns out lots of us are nuts about well... nut butter! It would appear a lot of the group are partial to a spoonful (or two!) before heading out the door on our runs!

We had a short commute to the church on the cards but that didn’t mean we couldn’t get a good run in, so we planned a route taking in a nice steady hill climb to start us off before arriving at the lovely warm St. Peter’s. We were met by church volunteer Moira who was on hand to show us all the tasks that needed doing.

Giving January blues the brush off!

We all quickly donned tools and got to work around the building, dusting, scrubbing and brushing everything we could! Lots of happy faces and people chatting their way through the jobs on hand showed that January needn’t be blue if you come to GoodGym!

Jenni (who was our lovely backmarker tonight, thank you!) was on hand to help everyone with some good RE refresher knowledge pointing out lots of things around the church and explaining what they were, hopefully useful for Sarb when helping with the kids homework!

Run for the hills!

With lots of us on hand to chip in, the cleaning was done in no time leaving us plenty of time for a great hill based fitness session on our way back. We visited the infamous West Walk for some speedy reps up and recoveries down. Everyone pushed to their own ability and although it’s a tough session I think everyone really enjoyed the challenge and embraced the hills and the training benefit it will have! We finished things off with a one minute wall sit where everyone really felt the burn!

Just a short jog back to base where myself and Chris hashed out the pun, then we finished by stretching out our well worked legs and it was home time!

What a fantastic way to spend a dark January evening!

Don't forget the January Challenge!

Lots of talk at the moment of the January challenge! This is a bit of (friendly!) competition between GoodGym areas to see who can rack up the most good deeds and distance in what is easily the hardest month of the year in terms of motivation to go outside in the dark and cold evenings - this is where GoodGym comes in! This year in Ealing our goal is to reach 140 good deeds between us and to try and run 1450 kilometres as a team. To count just make sure you're on Strava/Runkeeper and connect it up to your GoodGym account, that way all your training miles are counted. Then just come along to as many group runs and missions as you can squeeze in - everything counts towards our target even if you visit a different GoodGym area, if you are registered with Ealing it all counts for us! Read all about it and see our progress here.